Journey of Rapid Spaceback

Two years ago I became the owner of this Skoda Rapid Spaceback.

When I got the car the first thing that my friend and I did, we bought the equipment for car detailing to clean our cars and potentioally start a buissness in car detailing. Here are some pictures before cleaning and after.

Car looked like brand new especialy seats, there were no more spots of stains.

At first i didn't think I would do any mods to the car, until one day my friend and I started to look at the ambient lighting kit for car. Soon we bought one and fitted in his VW Passat B6 Variant. This was the moment wen it all begins. We bought another one and fitted in my Rapid.

We instaled symphony kit that is controled with app. For now only dash and foot lights are installed in the future, lights will also be in door cards, in handle and storage bin on doors but for that part i have some other planes which I will explain in detail later.

For how lights are installed. In the dash there was just enough space to put the strips in and cut to the right lenght. Foot lights in front are installed on plastic trim and under the seats on metal frame which is placed so that you can't accidentaly knock it off.

Power for the main unit is sourced form the light switch.

Black wire is put in pin 6 and red on pin 10. Now unit for ambient lights gets power whene you put light switch in DRL position(first turn of switch). Some get power from 12V socket in center console but in Rapid case this is not ok because it has permanent power, that means even when the car is not running 12V socket still has power. Second option could be to get power from infotainment unit so that whene you use infotainment system lights are on, I didn't want to mess with that as i was still learning about those things and didn't want to go that way. Recently i got an idea to get power from the fuse box on pin which was ment for OEM footwell lights. This is the option that i would probably do it now if I was doing it again. Maybe I would still do it later but for that you need to check if your fuse box has pin ready for this, if not I saw someone do the pins for the glovebox for some other project(he occupied one of the pins with something and later fit the thing that was supposed to go there and relocated the part to separete pin just for that).

As for the door lights, i have plans to change door cards to facelift version which has trim in the color of the dashboard. Power for the lights would come from the main power from the door(I would explain more in detail when this part of the project comes, still need to find cards in good condition that I could get and in color that I want). There are even more things than just lights that I want to do with the door cards but let that be a surprice for now.

Another idea that came in my mind was contrast stitching. I want to do that on steering wheel but the stitch on it is to complicated to do it good so I would do one of two options:

First: get cover in style I would like and stitching in the color I want(cheap)

Second: get VRS steering wheel(expensive), which would even add sporty look and be the design I want(also would match theme of sport and elegance that I want to build)

If I chose second option in design perspective would be the best but for my wallet it won't be, also I would look for vrs wheel with heating option for next retrofit(as far as I know Rapid couldn't have that but on Swing unit I found bit for turning on/off heating on it, just not sure if this was meant for Octavia or Superb as those could have it)

But contrast stitch wasn't just for steering wheel...

Shifter was the part to go and it tooks great the perfect touch would be VRS logo like in VRS cars but there wasn't five speed manual from MK3 Octavia or MK1 Kodiaq.

I would like to do stitching on seats where there is a main white stitch but whene I tried on head rest it started to look like those christmas candy bars, didn't like that look but I have some other ideas.

First: buy black or red marker for stiching and colour it (cheap)

Second: I wouldn't mind geting heated seats so i could buy used seats with heating and probably re-upholster them the way I would like(expensive)

After those two mods and cleaning one big project started to assemble. For months I have searched online for parts and everything I would need, until just a week ago the day came. I switched from Swing to Amundsen. This was a lot of work but the final result is worth it.

For this I would like to put some more pictures and explain in more details what I used, how everything worked so I will explain everything in detail in next post(size of files is starting to come to the end).